For influencer marketing to work in your favor, your target audience and the influencer’s audience must match. Before you reach out to the influencer or even understand which type of influencer to work with, you need to identify your target audience, one of the first steps required to running any business and creating products and services that make a real difference within your industry. It’s simple, if you share products, services, or ideas to the wrong audience, you won’t see any conversions.
Your target audience consists of a specific group of people with particular characteristics found within your target market. Therefore, your market is a lot broader and not as narrowed down. For example, a target market would be women ages 18 to 26, while your target audience would narrow this down to women 18 to 26 who enjoy travel and fitness.
To find the right target audience, you must:
Outline the Demographics:
To start, you want to outline their demographics which includes:
- Their age and gender
- Place of work and yearly income
- Relationship status
- Ethnic background
- Level of education
- Where they live and visit
Pretty much any information you can think of to better narrow down your audience. While it can sound a little invasive, it is crucial to ensure you get the information out correctly.
For example, if you know most of your audience is located in California, you will have a better time launching your content with their pacific daylight time zone. Furthermore, it helps determine how or what content to create and where to put it. Finally, 18 to 26 are more likely on Instagram than Facebook to give you another example.
10 Ways to Get to Know Your Audience Better
Highlight their Psychographics and Pain Points
This section focuses on why they buy and can better help you communicate your message.
Questions that determine this include:
- What common problems do they have?
- How do they live? What is their lifestyle like?
- What are their interests and hobbies?
- What are their buying patterns and habits like?
- How do they behave in your industry?
- Do they like brands, and if so, which ones?
Compare Your Content and Services
Once you have your demographics and psychographics outlined, you can better understand what to create and who to put on your team. Next, you want to compare your products or services to the information you determined above to select your campaign and influencer type better. The most important is that they share your target audience. How big their following is does not matter if their engagement rate is low and their audience doesn’t have any interest in starting.
Anything in business, including influencer marketing, starts with your audience. If you can’t determine the right target audience, anything you do next will only lead to poor or inconsistent results.